The invention relates to a folding device for making a fold in a first direction in a foldable wrapping material or material to be wrapped. The invention further relates to a folding assembly for wrapping one or more products to be wrapped in a wrapping material, which assembly comprises a folding device. The invention further relates to a method for making a fold in a first direction in a foldable wrapping material or material to be wrapped.
In the medical field, for instance in the field of eye surgery, medical instruments and the like have up until now been manually wrapped in a sterile manner in wrapping material, particularly surgical sheets, into a closed package. Irrespective of the dimensions of the medical instruments to be wrapped said surgical sheets have the same size, so that when the closed package is unwrapped the surgical sheet fully covers an instrument table. The surgical sheet therefore has dimensions that generally are much larger than necessary for wrapping the medical instruments, so that the surgical sheet is folded once or several times in order to correctly wrap the products to be wrapped. Folding the wrapping material and wrapping the products to be wrapped is adapted to among others the required medical instruments or depending on the wishes of the surgeon, which results in the dimensions of the products to be wrapped to vary and consequently the way of wrapping and folding also varies. Although manually wrapping is reasonably satisfactory, in daily practice an undesirable large number of packages turn out not to have been wrapped sufficiently sterilely. Moreover manually wrapping proves to take a lot of time, to result in too many pleats in the folding area, and/or not always to be of a reproducible quality.